When the Japanese came and took it all, with dismaying ease, the British
dream-time ended; the postwar years brought rapid decay, and equally rapid
aspirations for independence. In 1965, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge-
educated lawyer, became the country's first prime minister. Today's Singapore
is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew's vision than the Manchester
of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles's. Lee Kuan Yew's People's
Action Party has remained in power ever since; has made, some would say,
quite drastically certain that it would do so. The emblem of the PAP is a
cartoony lightning bolt striking within a circle; Reddi Kilowatt as the
mascot of what is, in effect, a single-party capitalist technocracy.

Finance Data a State Secret

SINGAPORE: A government official, two private economists, and a newspaper
editor will be tried jointly on June 21 for revealing an official Singaporean
secret - its economic growth rate.

Business Times editor Patrick Daniel, Monetary Authority of Singapore
official Shanmugaratnam Tharman, and two economists for regional brokerage
Crosby Securities, Manu Bhaskaran, and Raymond Foo Jong Chen, pleaded not
guilty to violating Singapore's Official Secrets Act.

South China Morning Post, 4/29/93

Reddi Kilowatt's Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable version of
convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a festive
party-hat by the designer of Loew's Chinese Theater. Rococo pagodas perch
atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic footage of atria
to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies. Along Orchard Road,
the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with multi- level shopping
centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly. Young, for the most
part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the local Gap clone,
they're a handsome populace; they look good in their shorts and Reeboks and
Matsuda shades.

There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident style in
Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see two young
Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black - jeans and T-shirts and
waist-length hair. One's T-shirt was embroidered with the Rastafarian colors,
causing me to think its owner must have balls the size of durian fruit, or
else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it, really, for
overt boho style. (I didn't see a single "bad" girl in Singapore. And I
missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and

CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road blandness that
one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted by Mormon missionaries.

"You wouldn't have any Shonen Knife, would you?"

"Sir, this is a music shop."

Although you don't need Mormons making sure your pop is squeaky-clean when
you have the Undesirable Propagation Unit (UPU), one of several bodies of
official censors. (I can't say with any certainty that the UPU, specifically,
censors Singapore's popular music, but I love the name.) These various
entities attempt to ensure that red rags on the order of Cosmopolitan
don't pollute the body politic. Bookstores in Singapore, consequently, are
sad affairs, large busy places selling almost nothing I would ever want to
buy - as though someone had managed to surgically neuter a W.H. Smith's.
Surveying the science fiction and fantasy sections of these stores, I was
vaguely pleased to see that none of my own works seemed to be available. I
don't know for a fact that the UPU had turned them back at the border, but if
they had, I'd certainly be in good company.

The local papers, including one curiously denatured tabloid, New
Paper, are essentially organs of the state, instruments of only the most
desirable propagation. This ceaseless boosterism, in the service of order,
health, prosperity, and the Singaporean way, quickly induces a species of
low-key Orwellian dread. (The feeling that Big Brother is coming at you from
behind a happy face does nothing to alleviate this.) It would be possible,
certainly, to live in Singapore and remain largely in touch with what was
happening elsewhere. Only certain tonalities would be muted, or tuned
out entirely, if possible. . . .

Singaporean television is big on explaining Singaporeans to themselves. Model
families, Chinese, Malay, or Indian, act out little playlets explicating the
customs of each culture. The familial world implied in these shows is like
Leave It To Beaver without The Beave, a sphere of idealized
paternalism that can only remind Americans my age of America's most fulsome
public sense of itself in the mid-1950s.